


in the woods somewhere

by babzilla



Series: lupi ante portus [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Attempt at Humor, Blood and Gore, F/M, Family Dynamics, Gen, M/M, Vampires, Werewolves, Witches, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26792818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babzilla/pseuds/babzilla
Summary: Rex wished he could say it was the first time he’d ever accidentally gotten fresh guts in his hair, but well. He’d be lying.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, Kit Fisto/CT-7567 | Rex (mentioned), Pre- CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Pre- CC-5052 | Bly/Aayla Secura
Series: lupi ante portus [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953808
Comments: 20
Kudos: 204





	in the woods somewhere

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Casual description/discussion of gore (non-graphic), mentioned animal death.

“Oh for— Fives stop touching it, you’ll catch diseases!”

Fives, preoccupied with alternately poking the grisly remains of the vampire and striking increasingly ridiculous poses while Echo acted as his cameraman, did not listen to Rex.

“Relax, he’s not putting it in his mouth, he’ll be fine,” Wolffe—their unfortunately named cousin—says, leaning against a tree and being completely unhelpful as he watched the two youngest among them poke the dead vampire with a stick.

“What was it even doing here?” Asks Bly, their other, equally unhelpful cousin who stood with hands on hips, surveying the twins’ progress like a sergeant inspecting his troops. “They don’t come out this close to the full moon.”

“There’s probably a nest in town. They get bolder when they’ve got a nest,” Cody says after a moment’s thought, still patiently helping Rex wipe down with the anti-bacterial wipes he’d produced from the high-visibility fanny pack that Rex could never, ever make fun of again unless he wanted Cody to remind everyone of the time Rex had run, full-tilt, into a vampire and shredded it in a (momentary!) blind panic.

 _This_ time, specifically.

“We went as far as the lake, but we couldn’t pick up any more scent trails,” Ponds—another cousin—announces, materialising out of the gloom, back from where he had been searching the forest. “Looks like it was the only one out.”

Following behind him— “Your fish boyfriend says hi, Rex,” says Fox, a person with whom Rex absolutely did not share a blood relation, and who he was going to murder shortly.

As soon as he was free of gross vampire gunk. 

Which, at the rate they were going through the pack of wipes, wasn’t likely to be any time soon.

 _Ugh_ , it was never coming out from under his nails.

Resisting the urge to whine like a pup, Rex locks his knees to keep from fidgeting and wishes he could say it was the first time he’d ever accidentally gotten fresh guts in his hair, but well. He’d be lying. 

Instead, he looks back toward the twins, who are still playing around with the remains of the undead like _animals_.

He doesn’t know where they went wrong with them.

He tries to share a commiserating look with Cody, but his older brother only looks quietly amused in that way he’s learned always spells trouble. Rex isn’t as intimately familiar with that look as some of their family, but he’s learned to distrust it, if not exactly fear it the same way that others do.

“It’s not so bad, Rex’ika,” his soon to be disowned older brother smirks. “At least you didn’t cry like that time with the deer.”

For exactly five seconds the woods around them fall utterly silent, even the curling fog around their feet seeming to have frozen in place. And then his assembled family members make very poor attempts to hide their snerking and sniggering. Traitors, the lot of them, to hold an accident from his tween years hanging over his head for over a decade. Rex should have moved to the farm years ago, except— he wasn’t sure what one did with a cow except to occasionally cook it into steaks and he was quite sure he never wanted to find out the intricacies of the dairy industry.

“The next time we have a ghoul infestation, I’m just going to let them eat all of you,” he says flatly.

And since the situation wasn’t enough of a circus already, Gree chooses that moment to come running into the clearing.

Panting, their cousin almost doubles over when he reaches them, asking:

“Sorry, sorry, I came as soon as I could— is it still here?”

“Nobody asked you to come!” Rex snaps, not needing yet another witness for what’s surely about to become another favourite story for the family to crow over when the holidays come back around.

“I texted him,” says Fox, providing yet another reason to justify his murder.

“I want to see the vampire!” Boba yells, popping up from over Gree’s shoulder.

“Why did you bring the kid?” Cody grumbles, pausing in trying to wipe the viscera from behind Rex’s ears to scowl at their cousin.

“I wasn’t going to leave him home alone,” Gree says like it should be obvious, dropping his pack to the ground and with it Boba— who wastes no time in running over to join Fives and Echo in poking at the slain vampire.

“Don’t put it in your mouth!” Wolffe calls after the boy, instead of doing something useful, like stopping him.

Rex ignores that for a moment, turning back to Gree who is snapping on rubber gloves and removing a sample kit from his backpack. “Doom is at home.”

“No, he’s not,” says Doom, coming into the clearing at a much more leisurely pace. “I wanted to see this.”

“Did it again, Rex’ika?” He asks, grinning maliciously as he drops a hand on top of Rex’s head.

Equally maliciously, Rex doesn’t stop him and is rewarded a moment later when Doom’s expression twists with disgust as he pulls his hand back to inspect it.

“Congrats— it’s never coming off,” Rex informs him cheerfully.

“Hey, when did you say this happened?” Gree shouts over his shoulder, interrupting any attempt Doom might have made to retaliate.

“Twenty minutes ago,” Fox, the dead man, answers.

“Why hasn’t it, you know—” Doom twiddles his fingers vaguely. “Poofed away?”

“I don’t know!” Gree answers, sounding obscenely delighted.

Heaving the heavy sigh of the long-suffering (which is no less than he deserves), Cody goes back to wiping behind Rex’s ears. “It’s new. They don’t disintegrate immediately if they’re freshly turned.”

“Then how long will it take?” Bly asks, looking at his watch as if he has any plans tonight other than instagram stalking the siren who runs the town choir because he’s too much of a coward to just ask her out.

“I’m not waiting around here until dawn,” Fox says immediately.

“Happily, you won’t have to,” Cody says, his amused smirk firmly back in place. “Go home and fetch Rex some clean clothes, and bring the gas can.”

“What? No!” Gree complains. “I need more samples!”

“It’s just a vampire. You’ve seen those before,” Cody says, unmoved. “Fox, go. Doom, help Wolffe move the carcass so we can burn it.”

Rolling his eyes, Fox goes, pulling Ponds along with him. Lip still curled with disgust, Doom followed after Wolffe, bodily moving Gree and shoo-ing the youngest out of the way.

Standing alone again, Cody pulls back from Rex, conscientiously gathering all the bloodied wipes into a plastic bag to burn with the vampire carcass.

“You’re fine, it didn’t get you,” he says.

Rex blinks, offended.

“Of course it didn’t _get me_ ,” he says, his voice calm and even and definitely not high-pitched and warbling with anxiety.

Behind them, Doom snickers conspicuously and Cody rolls his eyes sky-ward.

“Oh, relax. I’m just saying— you’re fine,” he says, sounding extremely patronising. “You know even a scratch from their nails can get infected—”

“I know how vampires work, Cody!”

“—because they’re filthy, and also—”

“Have dead-people germs, _I_ _know_ ,” Rex says, absolutely not whining, no matter what Cody will claim later.

“Good,” the sanctimonious bastard of a Pack Leader replies, happy to be getting the final word.

*

Later, when they’re walking home, all of them unhappily stinking of gasoline and wood smoke, with the youngest persuaded that _no, they would not be running through town while shifted, Boba, not until you’re sixteen_ — Rex voices a concern that’s been niggling away at him since Cody said the words.

“So we’ve got a vampire nest in town.”

“Ugh,” Wolffe says eloquently.

“Suppose we’ll have to take care of it,” Ponds sighs.

“Do we have to?” Echo complains. “I don’t want exploded vampire guts all over me.”

“That only happens if you run into them like Rex’ika,” Doom reassures him, working his way ever higher on Rex’s shit list.

“That’s half the fun,” says Fives, an endless fount of terrible ideas.

“I want to explode vampire guts!” Boba cuts in enthusiastically, trying to run ahead and getting scruffed by Ponds.

“ _No_ ,” they all say in unison. Like hell any of them are dealing with that at bath time; Boba’s got the longest hair out of all of them.

“Do you think they’re in the financial district again?” Fox asks, referring to the hundred or so square metres in town which housed several small office blocks and lawyers’ offices that everyone laughably called a district. “That was funny.”

“My bet’s on the high school— I’ve always said Ms. Se is an agent of evil,” Fives offers, referring to the much despised science teacher at one of the two high schools in town.

Bly says nothing, already on his phone and no doubt scrolling for updates from the object of his bottled affections.

Cody is also silent, but Rex is content to let him be. No doubt he’s cooking up a strategy that will allow them to clear out the nest and, most crucially, not get arrested in the process of doing so. Rex hasn’t come this far with no criminal record to speak of only to have it ruined by a bunch of bloodsuckers. 

At least, that’s what Rex assumes until they come up on the second to last turn before their road and Cody locks up, staring ahead.

Suppressing a sigh, Rex doesn’t have to look to know what has caught his older brother’s attention. 

Sitting incongruously between a hair salon and a Chinese restaurant, is the late night cat café, run by Obi-Wan Kenobi; a mild-mannered British man who in the right company referred to himself as only a hedgewitch (a statement which was believed by a sum total of zero people). The café itself was popular enough, but the man who ran it had been causing Cody to blush and stumble over his words since the moment he’d first introduced himself. A development that all the family had taken a keen interest in, if only so they could tease the Pack Leader mercilessly.

“Hello, my dears,” the man himself calls out, leaning out of the threshold to the café with a ready smile. “Have a good run?”

“Hi, Obi-Wan!” Fives chirps, in a voice promising nothing less than his patented brand of younger brother mischief.

In thanks for helping clean the vampire goo from his face, Rex takes pity on his older brother and grabs the twins by the backs of their hoodies and drags them away, making his own polite greeting to Obi-Wan while bodily ushering the rest of the pack ahead— doing everything short of actually nipping at their heels to get them moving.

“Bye, Obi-Wan!” Echo calls back, forever an accomplice.

“I wanted lemon chicken!” Boba complains, trying to drift back towards the Chinese restaurant and getting hiked up into Ponds’ arms for the trouble.

“We have food at home and you need a wash,” Rex says firmly, casting a look over his shoulder.

In the warm light of the café windows, Cody stands an almost _too_ polite distance away from the witch, hands gesturing lamely around the vicinity of his hips as if he doesn’t know what to do with them and looking like he might have swallowed a tennis ball whole.

Turning away, Rex decides he is going to count this meeting as another disaster.

And when Cody walks into the kitchen, almost forty-five minutes after the rest of them got home, and hands him a murky sea green cleansing potion, Rex decides to once again take pity on his older brother, and doesn’t say anything about the disappointed slope of his shoulders as he drinks it.

He’d get there. Eventually.

Probably.

**Author's Note:**

> Me: we’re gonna finish one of the WIPs before working on anything new.  
> My brain, at the slightest provocation: let's write this new thing in one night.  
> Me: excellent idea why didn’t we do that sooner
> 
> —
> 
> If you see any errors, let me know 😩


End file.
